Boenninghausen's Pocket Book online — what it is and where to read it

Clemens von Boenninghausen's Therapeutic Pocket Book of 1846 is the oldest repertory still in active clinical use. Faithful digital editions and modern reconstructions that have re-verified its data both circulate online.

What the Pocket Book is

Boenninghausen, Hahnemann's closest collaborator, built the Therapeutic Pocket Book on a different principle from the later Kentian repertories. Rather than indexing complete symptoms, he separated a symptom into its elements — location, sensation, modality, concomitant — and indexed each separately, on the reasoning that a modality proved for one part of a remedy's action can be generalised across the remedy. This doctrine of generalisation is the Pocket Book's defining feature: it makes the book compact and powerful for modality-led prescribing, and it asks the prescriber to understand exactly what is being generalised. The full clinical workflow is set out in the Boenninghausen method.

Because Boenninghausen's grading and remedy assignments are tied to that method, the integrity of the data matters more than usual. The modern Boenninghausen reconstructions — the Therapeutic Pocket Book re-edited against Boenninghausen's own sources — exist precisely to recover the original gradings that successive reprints had altered.

Reading the Pocket Book online

The 1846 text and Hempel's English translation are public-domain, so faithful transcriptions and scans circulate freely; the question is fidelity to the original gradings rather than cost. A reputable edition carries Boenninghausen complete and unaltered rather than abridged. You can read the Pocketbook directly inside Similia's free repertory, whose semantic search lets you reach a modality rubric — for instance worse from cold, better from motion — in natural language rather than by recalling Boenninghausen's index structure. For modality-led repertorisation that retrieval matters, because the method's power is in the modalities. For a structural comparison with the other surviving nineteenth-century repertory, see Boger's Synoptic Key.

References

• von Boenninghausen, C. (1846) Therapeutic Pocket Book, English translation by C. J. Hempel; public-domain editions available via the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/.
• von Boenninghausen, C., re-edited (2000s) Boenninghausen's Therapeutic Pocket Book, reconstructed editions verifying the original gradings against Boenninghausen's sources.
• Hahnemann, S. (1842) Organon of Medicine, 6th edition.